Karin Spaink - Disputes With New Age Proponents Over Physical Ailments

Disputes With New Age Proponents Over Physical Ailments

Spaink first came into the national limelight by accusing New Age writers such as Louise Hay, Thorwald Dethlefsen and Bernie Siegel of over-simplifying physical ailments by reducing them to a purely psychological phenomenon. Spaink, herself suffering from multiple sclerosis, was insulted by the suggestion that her disease was nothing more than the result of her own lack of willingness to heal. (Compare Idealism and responsibility assumption with Materialism; see also New Thought Movement.)

Her essay Het strafbare lichaam ("The Penal Body") coined neologisms such as kwakdenken ("quack thinking") and orenmaffia ("mind-Mafia") that even made it into the Dutch language dictionary. The latter term derived from the expression that something is "all between the ears," in other words, "all in the mind."

Read more about this topic:  Karin Spaink

Famous quotes containing the words age, physical and/or ailments:

    It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.
    Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)

    Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air.... It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog’s life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.
    George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)

    For the shoe pinches, even though it fits perfectly.
    Apples were made to be gathered, also the whole host of the world’s ailments and troubles.
    There is no time like the present for giving in to this temptation.
    Tomorrow you’ll weep what of it?
    John Ashbery (b. 1927)